P R E F A C E.

NB. Why man has the power to speak of the Mysterium Magnum.

human soul is a spark from the eternally-speaking Word of Divine Science and power, and the body is an essence of the stars and elements, and according to the inner ground, an essence of heaven as well as the hidden world, so he has power to speak of the Mysterium Magnum Great Mystery, from which all essences have originated.

10. If the great mysteries, the beginning and original state of all things, are encountered by us through Divine grace: that we may understand the same in true recognition with the spoken-in Word of Divine Science, as through the ground of the soul, we will write down its ground, as much as is permitted to us, in this book, for a memorial to ourselves and for the reader of this as an exercise in Divine recognition.

11. And we intend to indicate: 1. what the center and ground of all essences is; 2. what the Divine revelation through the speaking of the Word of God is; 3. how evil and good originate from one single ground, as light and darkness, life and death, joy and sorrow, and how that is in its ground, also for what purpose every essence and torment is useful and unavoidable; 4. how all things have their ground from the Mysterium Magnum, as from the breathing out of the eternal One; 5. how the eternal One introduces itself into sensitivity and distinctness for its own science and for the play of the eternal power; 6. how one may come to a true recognition of God and to the recognition of the eternal and temporal nature; 7. Item, how one may come into true contemplation of the essence of all essences; 8. Item, concerning the creation of the world and all creatures; 9. and then concerning man's original state, fall, and restoration, what he is after the first Adamic man in the kingdom of nature, and what he is in the new rebirth in the kingdom of grace, and how the new rebirth happens; 10. Also what the Old and New Testament each signify in one understanding.

12. And we will carry out such an explanation through all chapters of the first book of Moses original: "Moysis" and indicate how the Old Testament is a figure of the New. What is to be understood in the stories of the holy patriarchs, why the Spirit of God let them be written down by Moses, toward what the figures of these written-down histories point, and how the Spirit of God...